THE STORY OF THE COMMON EEL 67 



in a dense body. They are so closely packed together 

 as the narrower parts of the stream are reached, that 

 thousands may be taken out of the water by merely 

 dipping a bucket into the ranks of the procession. I 

 obtained a few thousand of these " elvers " lately from 

 the Severn and placed them on exhibition in the central 

 court of the Natural History Museum in London. The 

 Anglo-Saxon name "eel-fare" is given to this annual 

 march or " swim " of the young eels from the sea to the 

 fresh waters. 



Though riverside folk have never doubted that the 

 elvers are young eels which have been hatched from 

 spawn deposited by parent eels in the sea, and are 

 " running up " to feed and grow to maturity in the rivers 

 and streams inland, yet country folk away from the big 

 rivers have queer notions as to the origin and breeding 

 of eels. They catch large, plump eels a couple of feet 

 long in stagnant ponds hundreds of miles from the sea, 

 far from rivers, and more than a thousand feet above 

 the sea-level. They have no notion that those eels 

 originally " ran up " as little eels from the sea, nor that 

 many of them make their way across wet grass and by 

 rain-filled ditches back to the rivers and to the sea when 

 they are seven year's old. But that is now known to be 

 the fact. Just as there are fish, like the salmon, which 

 " run down " to the sea to feed and grow big and 

 " run up " to breed in the small pools and rivulets far 

 from the river's mouth, so there are other fishes, of 

 which the eel is one, which run up to feed and grow and 

 run down to breed that is to say, to deposit and fertilise 

 their eggs in the depths of the ocean. 



Fishermen who work river-fisheries for eels (far more 

 valued abroad than in England) distinguish " yellow eels " 

 and " silver eels " (see Plate I. opposite title page). We 

 used to distinguish also snigs and grigs, or narrow-nosed 



